* * *
The big stereo sitting in Cane's entertainment center was turned up. Way up. He needed to hear his new album when he showered three rooms down the hall.
As the lukewarm water poured over his shaggy hair, the music abruptly stopped. Cane was pissed. Now he would have to finish cleaning himself without Alice in Chains filling his trailer with screams of torment.
I should have remembered to rewind the damn cassette.
He finished showering quickly. Without the music, showering became just one more menial task that he was expected to perform. There was no fun in it. Fun was important.
People had always expected too much of him. He blamed that on Thane. Little brother was always the best . . . always climbing the ladder . . . always winning. Doing things that required way too much effort as far as Cane was concerned.
What a dumb ass.
He would probably be a lot better off if little brother never came along.
Damn right I would be. People would get off my back. I wouldn't have to share the -
He stood motionless and listened. His dog was barking explosively in the backyard. He found this especially alarming. Old Scrub was the most worthless dog that Cane had ever owned. For him to be exerting this much energy barking hysterically was unheard of. Outside something was very wrong.
Cane jumped out of the shower, almost fell on the slick linoleum floor, and rushed back to his bedroom. He hurriedly searched through the mounds of clothes piled on the unused side of his bed until he found some old cut off blue jeans. With one quick leap and pull, he considered himself adequately clothed to investigate. He was ready to get to the bottom of this ruckus. Almost.
While still in his bedroom, he reached into his night stand and grabbed a 9mm handgun that Thane had "lost" some two years earlier. The gun was more for decoration than anything else. He tried to convince himself that he would use it if the need arose, but that probably was not the case. He had been a coward going on twenty -five years now, and that reality was not going to reverse itself in the blink of an eye. Coincidentally, he began to get a little jumpy as he moved towards the back door of his trailer. The gun felt cold and heavy in his hand. It was a dramatic contrast to the lightheadedness and hot flashes coursing throughout the rest of his body. Despite his fear, he forced himself to open the back door and step into the night.
Cane's mobile home was a twelve year old, twenty eight by seventy footer, that he had purchased some six years earlier. He had paid cash for it and the little bit of land that it stood on, with the money he inherited after his parent's fatal accident. The rest he squandered.
At least I'll always have a roof over my head.
The little bit of honest money that Cane had earned since dropping out of school, he had made doing carpentry work. He had some skill, and he had done some pretty respectable work in and around his home. He was very proud of his latest project.
Two weeks earlier, he had installed some fancy vinyl skirting around the bottom of his trailer. The skirting ran vertically from the bottom of Cane's trailer to the ground, and almost completely encircled the structure. The only exception being about a ten foot long section that ran beneath the mobile home's back porch. He had purposely left this section off in order to gain access to the underbelly of his home. This way, he could crawl beneath his trailer and do repair work if the need ever arose. The missing section wasn't noticeable, and the overall job was neat and really helped the appearance of his home.
Cane stood on his back porch now. He had flicked the switch, and an old Mason jar fixture shot light out into the night. It lit up an area that extended just beyond the dog pen. His dog Scrub was frantic. In fact, he had never seen an animal so disturbed.
Scrub was a tremendously large dog that was half Rottweiler and half something else big. He had been given to Cane as a pup, and the dog usually expelled all his energies digesting the enormous amounts of food that he ate. That's why his current behavior puzzled Cane so.
"Scrub, Scrub, whatcha see boy?" Cane shrieked. "Whatsa matter boy? Whatsa matter, huh?" His pleas to the big oaf went unnoticed. The dog continued to bark so hard that Cane was sure that he was going to injure himself; he'd bust a lung, tonsil, or something.
Easy boy. Easy. What in the hell did you see out here?
It seemed to him that the dog wasn't even stopping to breathe. He was staring at the hole in the skirting below Cane's feet and barking, growling, and barking some more. His mouth was frothing, his ears were folded back, and his huge teeth snapped at an unseen enemy. The creature that he stared at through the wire fence that surrounded it acted very little like Scrub.
The big dog was worthless, but Cane still cared for it. His concern for his dog momentarily overrode his fear as he descended his back steps to go and check on Scrub. As he approached the big dog's pen he witnessed a series of events which left him absolutely dumbfounded. The fear quickly gained back its advantage.
* * *
In the blackness beneath the trailer, the ghoul waited on the sodden earth. It had heard the man step outside, and it was growing increasingly excited. Seeing the naked man earlier, so animated and so alive, had awakened something inside of it. Feelings it thought had died along with everything else were very much alive and of a very powerful nature.